Local businessman Michael Doherty, in an opinion piece today sums up the reaction of most community residents to the EDC controversy:
Holbrook spent more on relocation expenses (about $35,000 virtually tax-free) than the vast majority of Wayne County residents make in an entire year. Mr. Holbrook spent more on his desk than the tuition to attend IU East or Ivy Tech for a year. Every Wayne County resident is paying for that desk and relocation. Twenty percent (20 percent) of the county tax deducted from your paycheck every pay period is used to fund the EDC.
The board exists solely to foster economic development while protecting our investment. Regrettably, the board has turned into a glad-handing, cheerleading service for Mr. Holbrook. Not only has the board failed to fulfill its duties, it recently has rewarded Mr. Holbrook with a raise and a bonus in its “put up a united front” and “circle the wagons” mentality. Taxpayers can judge for themselves whether the board has acted responsibly. This taxpayer says no; they must go.
Link.
The Pal-Item has not backed off on its coverage of this issue, rounding up views from local government leaders against the EDC president, Don Holbrook:
County commissioner Mary Heyob said she was shocked in December when the board of the Economic Development Corporation of Wayne County in December gave its embattled president a vote of confidence.
“I almost fell off my chair when it was read,” she said Thursday of the resolution backing Don Holbrook. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Link.
But Holbrook is a fighter, and he is accusing the paper of running a smear job on his:
I think all would agree that the reporting on my personal background has been one-sided. I have chosen not to address the concerns publicly because the EDC Board, my employer, is fully aware of every question raised, and has to this point had no concerns with any of it. I understand the basic tenet of small-town journalism — scandal sells. As William Randolph Hearst said, “You bring me the pictures, and I’ll bring you the war.” He sold a few newspapers that way, I believe.
And this:
I call upon my employer, the EDC board, to resist the Wayne County Commissioners’ power play and make their decision regarding my future based on facts rather than conjecture. It’s time to say “enough” to bullying and yellow journalism.
Link.
“Power play?” They are the governing body for the county. As the highest elected officials in the county, I don’t think they have to “play” for power.
But as the paper points out, if Holbrook is fired for anything less that “extreme circumstances,” the EDC will owe him 6 months pay. Nice contract.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2006 at 4:01 pm and is filed under
Local Items.
«
Switching to Parallax for home broadband
Got conflict? Want to work it out? »
As the whole
EDC mess swirls on and the gloves come off, the Palladium-Item, Richmond's local daily newspaper, has continued to insist that its role in fueling the fire of outrage over the EDC's affairs has just been about
reporting the truth. It is with this sentiment that they've responded to public criticism of their aggressive coverage and editorializing, it is how they responded to concerns raised in an editorial board meeting I attended shortly after
the initial series ran on their pages, and it is how managing editor Rich Jackson responds in an
editorial column today. But Jackson and the rest of his staff surely know that the impact of their actions in this and every other matter they cover is not limited to the letter of the content they deliver; in a world of fast paced news delivery, short attention spans, and the need for sexy sound bites, the way the information is presented often has as much (if not more) impact than the "truth" that it might be trying to convey. In other words, the framing of an issue tends to trump the truth of an issue. This isn't their fault, but if credibility is important, it is their responsibility to acknowledge their role in that phenomenon.
Jackson, via his remarks, would have us believe that the Pal-Item's pursuit of the EDC story and similar scandals are solely about performing its duties of "watchdog journalism" - asking the hard questions and digging deep on behalf of public concerns. He invokes grand images around the intent of the country's founders, the dangers of unchallenged power, and the taxpayers` need for someone to protect them from the abuses of secrecy by public officials. And really, in my ideal version of what the local newspaper does, I agree with him that this obligation rises above all of the other kinds of information transfer that they perform.
But Jackson conveniently (though perhaps unintentionally) omits a few key factors from his soliloquy on credibility, and the most key (in my opinion) is that he and the Pal-Item staff get to choose how the fruits of their important journalistic endeavors are presented to the public, and in ways that almost completely determine how the information will be processed and used by their readers.
The size and font of a headline. The tone and connotations of the words used to sell and introduce a story. The photo that accompanies a story - how is it lit and cropped, what is the caption, how does it present the subject. The amount of column inches devoted to a story and its impact, and where in the publication they are placed. The quality and length of the quotes from sources that provide "balancing" viewpoints. The opinion pieces that accompany a major story, and if/how they blur the perceived line between reporting facts and editorializing on them. How many follow up stories are done. Whether or not a
special section of the Pal-Item website is created to draw more attention to a series online. And so on. All of these variables could ostensibly be said to have little or nothing to do with the "truth" that they help deliver, but all of them make up the all-important framing of the information and how it will be received.
Just as the majority of the public may not have the time to do the research and uncovering that the Pal-Item admirably takes on, the same majority does not have time to follow up on the sources or the research quoted in the resulting articles, and cannot necessarily, then, create for themselves a balanced view of a given issue without significant time and resources that most do not have to spare. And so they rely on what's available: the Pal-Item and the few other limited news sources available. I will certainly agree with anyone who says it is the public's responsibility to verify the information from first hand sources if they are going to act on it (or perhaps even spread it), but we all know that this isn't how public opinion is formed in this town or most any other. People see headlines from afar, gossip about what they might mean, and at best bits and pieces of articles are skimmed and extracted for further digestion. The implications of a story, and the emotions and thoughts its presentation evokes, become the story itself. Any good journalist or page layout editor or news staff member knows this, too: framing trumps truth. (If you want to know why and don't want to take my word for it, I recommend
Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.)
Jackson notes that if the Pal-Item ever did make a factual mistake or some other error that required addressing, there's always the great rectifying tool, "the correction." But we all know that unless you're scrambling to make things right in the wake of your own Jason Blair scandal, corrections don't get front page headlines with a full page photo, and they very rarely contribute to refining the framing of an issue. How do you publish a correction apologizing for the size of a headline? And perhaps that's why no one has sought corrections or clarifications from the Palladium-Item on these difficult issues: they feel that it really doesn't matter in the end, when the principles of fair and balanced reporting on a given issue have already been superseded by printing what sells papers. Maybe that's the Pal-Item readership just not holding up its end of the bargain? Maybe we need more Letters to the Editor about how the Editor spends his or her time? You're reading mine.
I admire Rich Jackson and his staff, and I think that on the whole they do an excellent job of balancing the difficult requirements of being the only local printed news source in a town where news sometimes comes hard (see: every front page weather story they've ever had to write). And I admire that at least some there subscribe to some greater notion of objective truth that every citizen in our community has a right to access in some pure form. But I don't think they should fool themselves - or their readers - by denying that they have (and often exploit) the ability to present the different sides of that truth
while also significantly shaping how it is received, and what people do with it. If they ignore
that truth, no triple-checking of facts or Code of Ethics will restore their credibility as a journalistic entity.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2006 at 1:26 pm and is filed under
consumer watch,
richmond, in . You can follow any responses to this entry through the
RSS 2.0 feed. You can
leave a response, or
trackback from your own site.